TL;DR:

Along with a larger team, I conducted qualitative research, created personas, developed a Japanese/English journey map, synthesized and delivered insights, and trained Japanese colleagues in qualitative user research best practices. 

Goals:

We worked with the Phase 1 client's parent company in Japan to:

1. Align future goals for both companies (based upon our previous work in Phase 1)
2. Capture and improve the internal experience for employees.

Process:

RESEARCH TRAINING

I (and other colleagues) created training materials and taught sessions to enable the IT team in Tokyo to conduct user research. After the training, the Japanese team help stakeholder and employee interviews.

PERSONAS

Using the interview transcripts from the Japanese team we trained, I drove the bilingual persona creation effort, and I made 4 distinct personas for the Japanese company based on common roles and tasks that employees typically perform:

JOURNEY MAP

Since the client decided against a large-scale survey similar to Phase 1, we instead created a journey map of an average Japanese employee's work day to capture tasks, pain points, and opportunities pertaining to internal systems and processes.

IDEATION WORKSHOP

Then, we used this journey map as the starting point for a collaborative ideation workshop between American and Japanese staff. Luckily, my +3 years studying Japanese helped alleviate some of the language barrier. 

Participants filled in any missing tasks or pain points on the journey map using sticky notes. After we considered "How Might We" improve the employee experience and Dot Voted, my team and I created a set of 6 Guiding Principles for the future employee experience.

Me presenting the rankings of tasks from the previous day's workshopping efforts.

CONCEPT VISUALIZATIONS

After further iterating on the workshop ideas, our team put them into thematic categories and created visualizations of how they could come to life to enable prioritization:

Over 20 visualizations like this were crafted, some storyboards and others wireframes.

INSIGHT OVERLAP + SYNTHESIS

Now that we had tasks, pain points, insights, and guiding principles from both clients, we were able to determine the best way to marry these into one cohesive set of solutions.

Because I'd been involved from the beginning of Phase 1, I was able to synthesize thematic and practical overlaps between tasks and pain points across both organizations, enabling us to create a prioritized roadmap for the implementation of the concepts we'd visualized.

Combining findings from Phase 1 and Phase 2 led to net-new insights.

Outcome:

Finally, all of these insights and concepts were workshopped in Tokyo with the clients from Phases 1 & 2 so they could align on the timing of the roadmap. 

• Both clients were able to envision a future of a shared online ecosystem, further cementing their partnership after a lengthy acquisition.  
• We delivered a final prioritized roadmap for a future intranet for both companies.
• Two concepts are already underway, with more being pitched in the future using our roadmap, leading to more work for my company!

Racked up thousands of steps and miles flown for my two trips to Tokyo and back!